Once again I find myself sitting in the airport with way to much time on my hands, which means that now is a good time to write down my thoughts on another great conference.
php[world] was a brand new conference put on by php[architect], which is the same team that puts together php[tek]. Eli, Heather, Sandy, Oscar, and Kevin are well versed in putting together conferences and it once again showed with php[world].
The venue was the same idea as php[tek], with the Sheraton Premiere serving as the location for [world]. It is close enough to get around to different places with minimal effort, but sometimes that minimal effort is more than enough to keep pepole at the hotel. All but two of the rooms sat aorund a large lobby area that was heavily used as a place for people to interact, and it worked well. Just like with [tek] it was easy to find people to talk to, which means the hallway track was varied and just as good as most conferences.
It's no suprise that the php[architect] crew picked a great speaker list. They managed to bring together people from many different PHP ecosystems into a single conference were ideas were shared amongst all of the projects. The ending keynote featured representatives from Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Magento, Symfony 2, Laravel, and Zend Framework. There was no shortage of good talks to choose from.
I also met a few new faces, and it's always a wonderful feeling when someone new to a conference gets to interact with the larger PHP community. I also got to meet up with many faces and friends from previous conferences. Ideas were exchanged, thoughts are formulated, and I leave with many different things that I want to do.
The highlight of the conference was a talk by Yitzchok Willroth, better known as @coderabbi. He gave an excellent talk on becoming a better developer by utilizing some of the thing he has learned from his faith and how to apply them to programming. Every single teaching had a message, and every developer in the room could take away at least one.
Overall, this is another conference I'm looking forward to attending next year. php[architect] hit it out of the park, and now I can't wait to see what they have in store for php[tek].